The Socket Error Story

Now you may scoff and snicker or hopefully might be sympathetic to what I'm going to tell you. But all I can think of, looking back is "How stupid could we be." Yeah, some solace, I was not in it alone.

When the Internet first came to Mangalore we were excited, wondering how was it going to be to have the whole world at our fingertips; what! that's how they advertised for it.

So we went to this Internet centre which obviously was just set-up and new. The computers seemed newly waxed and shiny and there were two dolts there pretending to know everything about everything.

I am not sure if some of you Mangaloreans remember, but this place was owned by some guy called Raj...something and I think it was in this place opposite the Hotel Roopa building. Anyway, this Raj something is past any bad publicity since this was years ago, when we were innocent Internet hungry kids... ok ok... college students.

A bunch of us went to explore the Internet (hey, that was not meant to be corny, it just turned out that way) and well everyone wanted to go to www.yahoo.com.
My friend and I were at one computer, of course I didn't want to go exploring alone; www.yahoo.com it was.

Some guys around there said it was started by Shammi Kapoor, who made the word 'Yahoo!' popular in Hindi cinema when he sang a song called 'Yahoo!' in a movie.

Anyway, when we typed www.yahoo.com, we saw the page getting loaded slowly, very very slowly. We kept craning our necks trying to get a sneak preview of what the Internet looked like on other people's computers. The "Master Computer", which was being used by Raj something seemed to be busy, with lots of pages being loaded and fast. That was where we wanted to be.

When we asked one of the dolts what the hell was wrong with our computer, he said, "Well, it's bound to happen you know. It's all new and it will take some time. Also, there might be a lot of people connecting to the Internet now, so the speed is slow."

Yes, of course the computer had to be primed and had a gestation period of 12 months before it could load a pudgy little page on the screen. But remember the innocent kids (we)? Well we fell for it, hook, line and sinker.

When the page didn't load, we kept hitting the refresh button and then it went through the painful process of starting to load up all over again and suddenly stop.
And bear in mind, this bloody show was costing us 90 bucks an hour (in Indian Rupees of course).
Being students this was not cheap at all but our great adventurous spirits were keeping us up, until we hit,"Socket Error."

"Socket Error" post-fixed with a vague integer was the highlight of the day.
After half an hour of staring at "Socket Error" and wearing out the refresh key and clicking every possible button on the page, one of the dolts came to us, "You're one hour is up. That will be ninety rupees please."

So our first Internet experience was probably like the first time we did it, the big question being, "Did it or did it not happen."

At the end of one hour we were almost broke, confused and knew that we should NOT be telling this story to ANYBODY.

And after almost twelve years, I snapped.